July 30, 2004, 12:49 a.m.
Shoes Ahoy!

All this week while Democrats have been breathing fire and venting steam in Boston, it has been nothing but pack, pack, pack around here. That, and eat, eat, eating our way through a 50-pound bags of fish sticks I bought last winter in a sudden burst of Yankee thriftiness, and which until now has lain forgotten in the back of the freezer.

"Oh. Fish sticks," the children say, coming in for supper. "Yay, I guess."

So tonight we had fish sticks again, one steak divided five ways, miso soup, and pasta with the fag-ends of parsley. That leaves us with two bananas, a yellow pepper, and those inevitable little gourmet jars of curried-whatnot and sundried sasquatch puree that no one will ever eat but that are morally impossible to throw out. Also, fish sticks. The trouble I have is that it seems indecent to buy groceries when we're about to decamp for a month to Maine.

Like the delegates at the Democratic Convention, everyone around here is terrifically pent-up. Unlike the delegates, however, there's no strain in being "positive" and "forward-looking." Every night (over fish sticks) the children compete to explain in minute detail the positive rural experience to which they most look forward. Every sentence begins, "The first thing I'm going to do is — " and almost always ends with some combination of "jump off" and "dock" and "marshmallows."

Meanwhile, we pack.

"I can't find my shoes," Paris yells from upstairs.

"Neither can I," Violet says from the hallway.

"Keep looking," I call from my desk, where I am hunting down and paying utility bills from amidst the flurries and drifts of paperwork I should have filed months ago.
"I can wear these to Maine," Violet announces, clicking towards me in a pair of purple plastic princess slippers. She turns to speak to someone behind her. "I'm going to do some taps now," she says. "I'll show you where some tap shoes are. And I will give you a ballerina dress."

"Thank you, Violet," says Phoebe, out of view.

"Nope, not here!" Paris yells from the dining room. "I'll check under the — hey, that's where my killer whale went..."

In the doorway to my office, Violet swings her shoulders and sighs elegantly. "Sauntraday, rookaday, long-fong," she says. "That's how I speak French down the stairs." She taps her purple plastic princess slipper. "Tap, tap, tap."

Phoebe's voice pipes up from behind her. "I'm a little girl from town and I need some stickers," she says, emerging from around the corner. She is naked and has pasted herself stem to stern with bright pink heart-shaped Post-It notes that came with someone's long-ago Valentine's card.

Violet and I both burst out laughing. Molly comes down the stairs. "Phoebe!" she says with a brisk mixture of amusement and censure, and I suddenly realize that in her voice you can already hear my voice, and I realize just as fast that some day she will realize it and hate it, as I did when I first heard my mother's voice coming out of my mouth. Perhaps eventually, like me, she will not mind; will even take a perverse pleasure in the passing-down through generations of certain maternal inflections, the only immortality most women can enjoy on earth. In this manner, without outwardly stirring, I zoom forward and backward through 20 years and arrive home just as Molly is asking, "Mummy, have you seen my shoes?"

"Argh, not you, too?" In the last week 75 percent of the children have lost every other article of footwear except their rain boots. Only Phoebe has managed to retain a couple of pairs of shoes. This is because she still relies on me to put them on and take them off, and I happen know what they cost.

Some time later, while Molly and Paris are still stalking sneakers in the remote recesses of the house, and in between bill-paying and e-mail-checking, I become aware that Violet and Phoebe are sitting on the stairs outside my office. It is pleasant to hear them chatting, but I do not pay much attention until there's a sudden outpouring of piteous mewings, and Violet says sternly, in a vaguely Continental accent, "Come here or I will give you a smack!"

"Now, wait a minute — " I protest, getting up from my desk.

"We're playing a game," Phoebe explains from the landing. "I'm a baby."

A few minutes later, Violet strides past and takes up a noble pose at the front door. She lifts an invisible bow and arrow, waits, and lets fly at a passing police car.

"Waaaa!" wails Phoebe from the stairs.

"Thwap!" Violet murmurs, as another arrow finds its victim. "I've killed them," she says softly, "I've killed her."

"Kill her? Kill you?" asks the infant. "Violet? Violet?"

"Violet," I say automatically, not looking up from my checkbook, "please answer your sister."

"But I'm dead."

"Oh. What happens in the game now?"

"I put a hairclip in, so she's dying," Phoebe explains in her normal voice. I peer around the corner to see Violet spread-eagled on the floor, with Phoebe spiking her solicitously in the arm. The body does not flinch. Violet takes justifiable pride in her personal courage. Once as I was tentatively spraying sunscreen on her screwed-up face, she remarked, "You're not the only one who's brave, you know."

And she's not. There's another one.

"Mummy, can you fix my bandage?" Paris asks, limping down the stairs. Earlier this week while shoeless at a neighbor's, he tore a long, terrifying strip out of the sole of his foot on a nail protruding from the floor. Once again he occasioned floods of blood, once again anxious women washed his wounds, praised his bravery, and asked repeatedly, "Are you okay?" And once again, as soon as the thing was bandaged, he expressed perplexity at all the hand-wringing and brow-mopping: "Sure. Why wouldn't I be?"

"Sweetheart," I cannot help saying, "you know, if you had only been wearing your shoes — "

"But I can't find them!"

As we drive past Boston, workers will be dismantling the protest cage, sweeping confetti into garbage bags, and pulling down festive DNC bunting. We, on the other hand, will be keeping our eyes open for a shoe shop.